Using newspaper obituaries to “nowcast” daily mortality: Evidence from the Italian COVID-19 hot-spots()

Real-time tracking of epidemic helps governments and health authorities make timely data-driven decisions. Official mortality data, whenever reliable and available, is usually published with a substantial delay. We report results of using newspapers obituaries to “nowcast” the mortality levels obser...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Buonanno, Paolo, Puca, Marcello
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Elsevier B.V. 2021
Materias:
Article
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8529307/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/33579561
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.healthpol.2021.01.006
Descripción
Sumario:Real-time tracking of epidemic helps governments and health authorities make timely data-driven decisions. Official mortality data, whenever reliable and available, is usually published with a substantial delay. We report results of using newspapers obituaries to “nowcast” the mortality levels observed in Italy during the COVID-19 outbreak between February 24, 2020 and April 15, 2020. Mortality levels predicted using obituaries outperform forecasts based on past mortality according to several performance metrics, making obituaries a potentially valid alternative source of information to deal with epidemic surveillance.

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